Executive Summary

Critical Resistance (CR) is a national grassroots organization that seeks to abolish the prison industrial complex (or PIC), a term CR uses to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social, and political problems. CR aims to support those targeted by systems of punishment and criminalization and bolster community resistance to this violence. As such, CR’s membership consists largely of people targeted by the PIC: people of color, queer and nonbinary people, poor and working class people, formerly imprisoned people, and others who have been targeted by systems of criminalization and imprisonment. CR has members across the country and organizes through local chapters – Oakland, Los Angeles, New York City, and Portland.

CR’s grassroots campaigns aim to dismantle structures of imprisonment and policing, change resource allocation in local communities, and build meaningful and life-affirming infrastructure. CR frequently works in coalitions to collaborate with organizations working on intersecting issues, contribute to a variety of skills and perspectives, and cohere strategy, analysis, and vision. Through campaigning, political education, coordinating mobilizations, and maintaining local community projects and prisoner engagement programs, CR’s organizing supports the leadership of those most directly impacted by the PIC, equips community members to resist harmful the structures and practices of the PIC, and emboldens community members to demand investments into essential infrastructure and resources. This work advances CR’s vision of genuinely healthy, stable, and safe communities with resources like food, housing, meaningful employment, education, and freedom.

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